Sand as far as the eye can see

🏜️Sand is the latest release by @devirgames and it looks magnificent. 🤩 This game transports you to a kind of post-apocalyptic world, where there are mostly only deserts and wastelands left. You play as travelling merchants riding on giant worms 🐛, trying to make the most money by trading plants, crafts and relics - but as you do so, you also help bring life back to this barren world by distributing all kinds of plants 🌱 between cities and tribes.

Sand is a fairly simple but thinky competitive pick-up and deliver game. I say simple, but learning wasn’t that easy, thanks to the rulebook that haphazardly starts listing game mechanics. 😶‍ But when you get going and realize some mistakes after a few rounds, it’s pretty straightforward: you move around the map, gather plants from the cities, that you can bring to camps to exchange for money and craft or relics. These crafts and relics you can then bring to the cities or the port to sell for even more money. 💸 Because travelling is exhausting, you will often have to tend to your worm’s hunger, thirst and health.

To make things interesting, you do everything by allocating dice 🎲 to actions. There are 4 dice that are rolled each round, and every player will use the same values. Some actions will require specific values, some will need specific colors too: e.g. feeding your worm with the red die, or collecting blue plants with the blue die. 🧐 Finding the optional way to execute your turns is the constant challenge of the game. As you load up things to your worm, you also block off action slots, so travelling far is hard.

During the game you can draft objectives, and as you cover up icons with delivered goods you gradually unlock 4 helpers and improve your worm to make things easier. There are even asymmetric characters you can play as, with wildly different abilities. Additionally players will place out Song tokens in cities and vye for the support of minor tribes.

You play for 6 rounds and see who wins. And like any good merchant, you only want one thing: to have the most coins! 😉💰